


being a thing immortal as itself

by apollonemos



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, ghost!phil/reaper!dan, major character death technically happens before the story even begins, this started off as a joke and turned into the longest fic i've written to date whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 14:43:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5094542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollonemos/pseuds/apollonemos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil is a ghost looking for purpose. Dan is a reaper looking for Phil. Death doesn't have to change everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	being a thing immortal as itself

**Author's Note:**

> This started out with the intention of being a short, sweet, silly little fic. Now, it's the longest one-shot I've written to date. Written entirely within the past few hours, not proofread, and fueled on by an exhausted, stress-induced need to do something.  
> Title from the Bard, Hamlet.  
> EDIT: I went through a proofread this; hopefully it improves the overall quality of the fic at least a little!

Phil always figured he’d know if he were a ghost. He’d always been fond of scary movies, even when he was a kid. Creepy culture was so intriguing to him — the well-accepted cultural myths and urban legends and the tried-and-true rules to the unearthly and unexplained. His older brother would even let him watch scary movies with him (secretly, of course), much to his parents’ annoyance. 

At some point, he even tried his own hand at filming horror movies, when he was still pretty young. A mix of bad scripts, awful acting, and shaky camera work made sure it never amounted to anything more than some clips on his hard drive to look back on and laugh at. He figured he was never very good at being in front of a camera. Much too awkward, never quite knew what to do with himself. He let go of his dream of being a weatherman and tucked his old plastic hand-held camera away. He went to university and got a degree and a decent job and found a flat cheap enough that he didn’t even need a roommate. It wasn’t great, but it was good, and Phil was really quite genuinely happy.

So it doesn’t really make sense, these people saying it was a suicide. Everything was going just fine for him. He liked his life well enough, had no real reason for throwing it away. Phil stands helplessly nearby, and every time those officers say that he might have done this to himself he watches his mum fall apart again and his dad pull her a little closer and his brother shrink in on himself a little more. Phil wishes he could say something, or move something. No matter how much he shouts no one hears him, and his arms keep phasing through whatever he means to touch. 

But even if he could get some message across, he’s not sure what he would say. He feels certain he wouldn’t have hurt himself, but he can’t be sure because he doesn’t remember. Doesn’t remember dying. Didn’t even realize he was dead, at first. He walked about cluelessly, at first, feeling very vaguely distant but quite normal overall. The shock of seeing his name and lifeless body on the news sent him spiraling. He stumbled around haphazardly for a while, swiping out at faces and falling through walls, screaming and wailing and trying to get someone, anyone, to acknowledge that he was there, and real, and alive and not just stuck in some horrible, terrible dream. 

It’s a strange sensation, to be falling apart with the whole world around him, but being utterly unable to interact with anyone. Stranger by far is getting accustomed to it.

It only takes him a few days to come to terms with being dead. His apartment is closed off, so he lingers there when he needs some quiet. His family will be coming any time before the end of the month to clear out his belongings so that the landlord can find a new (living) tenant. Phil tries not to think about how hard that will be on them. He can only imagine the somber silence that will settle over these rooms as they carefully pack his things, these material remnants of his life, into tidy boxes to be stored and stowed away and spoken about in hushed tones. Until that happens, Phil sits in the familiar rooms, doing nothing in particular. He has all the time in the world, now, to overthink things.

He wonders if this qualifies as haunting. Can a ghost be truly haunting something if there’s no one there to be haunted? He supposes so.

Looking at all his stuff (games and figurines and DVD sets and unpaired socks), Phil wonders how he could leave so little behind. He thinks about those whole-hearted but ultimately dismal attempts at videos he’d recorded, so many years ago. He wishes he’d done something with them, rather than let them stagnate in folders on his computer. He wishes he’d left behind something worth remembering.

—

Two weeks after his death and they rule it an accident. They couldn’t find a note (yet somehow Phil still wishes he’d left one, for closure’s sake; anything might be better than this sudden, jarring transition, with no warning or planning or expectation), or any other evidence that it may have been an intentional incident of any sort. Whatever witnesses they managed to find said it all just happened very quickly, a blur, hard to say what really happened, but a shame really, such a nice young lad by the looks of it, rushing over to the tracks to pull some small kid away from looking over the edge and he just sort of. Fell. Lost his balance and stumbled onto the tracks and the train was coming and he must’a seen it but he didn’t move and, Good Lord In Heaven, it was awful, just awful. The news stops talking about him within a few days.

His family, they bury what’s left of his body and cry over his headstone and it’s all very sweet and touching. Phil watches his family mourn and try to live around the hole he’s left. Then, they wipe the tears away and get started on preserving what they have left. They do empty out his apartment; they make a day of it. They go room by room, go through everything, and they talk about him the whole time. They do a good job at putting everything on the brighter side. They don’t talk about him as if he’s still there, but they talk about what they think Phil would say, or what Phil did this one time, and do you remember that story Phil told us about that wacky character he ran into on the streets? They smile, and they laugh, and Phil’s confident that they’re going to be alright. He leaves them alone, after a while, because he doesn’t want them to feel his presence. In most of the movies he’s seen, a ghost’s presence is heavy and horrible and hurts the people who feel it. Although Phil would like to think of himself as a fairly benevolent ghost, who would maybe only haunt people who are mean to dogs and spit in public, he’s not going to take any chances when it comes to his family.

He keeps his distance. From everyone.

He doesn’t stay in any one place for very long. His apartment has new tenants, a young couple with big plans and a bright future, and Phil was never attached enough to the place that he’d want to cause them any trouble. He spends some time with their cat before leaving, though; it stares him down for a good few minutes before trying to rub up against his legs. Phil almost imagines he can feel it.

He drifts between coffee shops and arcades and gardens. He watches people do the things he misses doing and listens to them and wishes he’d known he was going to die so he could’ve planned one long, wonderful day of soaking up everything that had made life worth living.

He’s discovered that, if he concentrates on the right emotions, he can sort of touch people. Not in, like, a traditional sense. More of an emotional sense. For example, if he concentrates very hard on the singular emotion of how lovely it feels to feel sunshine on your skin on a cold day, he can touch someone and they might feel a small, unsolicited sliver of that very same emotion. It’s not something he can do easily, and not something he does often because most of what he feels are variations on sadness and frustration. He doesn’t want to push that on anyone.

Mostly, Phil wonders what he’s supposed to be doing. It’s sort of what university was like, being pushed into a situation where you’re sure you have to be doing something but you’re not sure what, but you do know that you’re very worried about it. The anxiety bubbles under his skin and sends him, occasionally, on stressed little flurries where rushes about aimlessly until he wears himself out.

He thinks back to all the things he thought he knew about ghosts. They’re spirits of the dead who stay in the physical realm because they have “unfinished business”, a phrase that always sticks out in his mind in a dramatically vivid American accent. As far as Phil knows, he has no business that needs finishing of any sort. His apartment’s clean, his family’s going to be fine, and he lived a happy, if short, life. Sure, there are things he wishes he’d done, but nothing he can do now that he doesn’t have a body.

He sits on the edge of a pond, his toes in the water not making any ripples but certainly attracting stares from the nearby geese, and resolves that he’ll just have to wait this out, and make the most out of what he can do.

—

Four months later and Phil’s going mad with want for release. He can’t stand it. The silence, the wait, this awful state of anticlimactic anticipation is driving him crazy. He’s half-tempted to start haunting people just for something to do.

By this point, he took the initiative to explore the world, or, at least, what bits he was especially interested in seeing. Florida for old time’s sake, Las Vegas because why not, Japan because it was always a dream of his. He sees everything he wanted to see, watches the living people experience everything in his place, and returns home feeling dissatisfied and morose.

He misses familiarity. He misses being able to go home and curl up on his couch and watching Buffy for the thousandth time.

He’s lonely. He wishes he had someone to talk to, someone who would talk back. He’s glad that he at least manages to get the attention of animals, who always respond to him somehow, but he’s desperate for conversation. More than once Phil has sat at a table full of people, adding comments to their conversations and pretending they were talking back to him. It’s never convincing. He’s even sought out other ghosts, hanging around spots he thinks might be prime for haunting or death. It’s grim, he knows, but it doesn't work anyway so it's not really worth dwelling on.

He wonders if maybe he’s broken, somehow. Maybe he missed a step. Was he supposed to do something, immediately after his death, something decisive that would get him into heaven or hell or wherever he’s meant to be? He wonders if this is limbo.

—

He sneaks into movie theaters (it still feels like sneaking, like it’s wrong somehow even though he’s dead) and crouches on the stairs of the mezzanine to watch scary movies and romantic comedies and animated kids' films. The audiences shriek and laugh and are generally so responsive, and the strong smell of popcorn is wonderful. It’s his favorite place to be. With everyone facing the screen, and the unspoken rule that no one talks to anyone around them, Phil can almost fool himself into thinking he’s alive.

It’s a scary film, this time, very suspense-heavy with plenty of eery ghosts and jumpscares. Phil’s grinning everytime the audience shouts (because he's already come to see this one before), and trying to absorb whatever lore he can about spirits and theories of how to pass on.

The usher passes by with his soft red torch, walking steadily past, and Phil shrinks back by force of habit. As he trails the guy, his eyes latch onto the red-lit face of a man down the row. The man is facing him, and for that split second before the red light moves off from his face, he looks Phil straight in the eye as his face splits in a wide, toothy grin.

Phil scrambles through the walls and into the blaring sunlight, a heart he doesn’t have going a million beats a minute.

—

Phil wasn’t sure if it was a fluke or a mistake or some sort of cosmic happening, but he beats himself up over running away from the whole thing so quickly. Here he’s been, moping about in stereotypical sad-lost-spirit fashion for nearly half a year and at so much as a hint of being acknowledged by another person (or, at least, person-shaped being; one can never be too sure) he flees. Who even knows when something of that sort will happen again (if it happens again), and Phil just threw whatever chance he may have had at making real contact with someone straight out the window. What if the guy had been a ghost, too, lonely and looking for someone like him? What if he’d been Phil’s spirit guide, sent to get him out of here and put him on the right path with a stern talking-to about not getting lost between worlds again?

And stupid, dumb, awkward, clumsy Phil went and screwed it all up just like he screwed up getting that kid away from the tracks and getting run over by a train, a huge, roaring, metal, unstoppable thing coming straight at him and too stunned to move and wishing anyone would just grab him and get him out of the way, get him out get him out get him —

Phil clutches at his head and grits his teeth and screeches and wails, because no one can hear him because he’s alone because he’s dead.

—

It’s only five days before Phil sees the man again. And that’s because the man has actually been looking for him.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

Phil doesn’t turn around, figures it’s just another person not speaking to him, even when the speaker clears his throat pointedly. If he turned, the whole thing might have been much more appropriately dramatic, but as it stands the man has to maneuver himself into Phil’s direct line of sight, getting far to close and looking right at him. Phil startles back, pushing down the urge to run away, and moves his hand to his chest. The man straightens up, looking rather put-off, and studies Phil with pointed up-down glances. Phil, having become very accustomed to being ignored, is overwhelmed by the attention. He’d always been shy, never really knowing what to do with himself, always laughing off attention and looking at his shoes and hooking his fingers into his pockets the wrong way, but the past several months have made him downright timid and jumpy.

And the man is intense; everything about him seems focused and intentional. He doesn’t look any older than Phil, but is certainly more composed. Dark hair, dark eyes, carefully calculated posture.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he says again.

“Uhm,” Phil replies, eloquently, voice very hoarse and somehow also squeaky. He clears his throat.

“Everywhere. I’ve looked everywhere. I’m used to spirits moving around, but they usually always go back somewhere. They’ve got regular spots. The closest thing I could find for you was that theater, but even then you’re pretty picky about the movies you see so it was really very hit-and-miss.”

“I’ve. I wasn’t. I didn’t.”

“I know you’ve been lost, I know you weren’t trying to make it difficult, I know you didn’t know. It’s not really a huge concern of mine. Well, yes, you are a concern of mine, but you’re not really an inconvenience. Really all you’ve done is made it harder on yourself. So, there’s that.” The man offers him a small, polite smile. It’s much more tame than that wild, red-lit one he’d shot at Phil in the theater. It doesn’t matter, Phil’s just stunned to see someone smiling at him. (And it's a nice smile.) “It is partially my fault, though, you’ll have to forgive me. I’m pretty new at this.”

“What. New at what, exactly?” Phil asks, confused.

“Oh, uhm, well. Yes, alright, I guess I should explain.” The man doesn’t hold out a hand, but Phil imagines he might have at this particular point in the conversation. “My name is Daniel. I’m here to reap you, as it were.”

Oh, Phil thinks. “Oh,” Phil says.

“Before you start getting nervous, I promise you it’s really not as morbid as it might sound,” Daniel continues in a rush. “A very normal part of life — er, well, death, you see. Some spirits, they stay a little longer. It’s not unusual, really, but you have to be gathered up and shown the way out eventually, so I’m here to make sure you get where you need to go safely. If not always in a timely manner.” Daniel’s grin flicks out here, a little.

Phil notes that, while helpful, the whole description is rather vague. “Where am I going, exactly?”

“Ah, well, that depends, mostly. There’s no real heaven or hell, you see, just a Great Beyond where souls gather. Not too bad, but certainly a bit mysterious.”

“Then who are —“

“Look,” Daniel says, “I get that you have questions, that’s great, but can we do this somewhere else maybe? I’d offer to buy you a cup of coffee, for instance, but, well.” There’s that hint of a grin again. Phil thinks he sees a dimple.

“Sure.”

—

They end up in a park, sitting on a bench in front of a display of roses. It’s late in the afternoon, so any families milling about are calm and the general din is at a low murmur. Phil is sitting facing out towards the flowers, hands shaking a bit, while Daniel is facing him directly, looking at him unabashedly.

“So how did you get to do, uhm, what you’re doing?” Phil asks, not whispering but voice not quite at full volume.

“I became a Reaper because I asked to be one. I wanted something to do. This seemed like a good cause, a good way to stay on Earth at least part of the time but still stay occupied.”

“You were bored?”

“I wasn’t ready to leave.”

“Oh. I’m not sure I am either.”

“I sort of got that sense,” Daniel says. Phil looks over at him, and his eyes are sympathetic.

“I’m afraid I’m going to miss it here.”

“Mm. I know how you died. It was unexpected. You weren’t ready,” Daniel says softly.

It’s nothing Phil hasn’t thought himself plenty of times before, nothing he hasn’t dwelled on and agonized over and philosophized about, but hearing it in those calm, certain tones makes it real and solid and believable. He wraps his arms around his midsection, tugs at his sides, tries to push these tears down. He sees Daniel make a fast-aborted move to pat his back.

“I’m sorry, Daniel, I’m just,” Phil chokes out.

“It’s fine. It’s normal.” Daniel grimaces. “Hey, look, I wasn’t ready either. Not everyone is. Most of us have something we wanted to do that we never got around to, or regret not having done things to make our lives... more than what they were. That’s alright.”

Phil sobs. “I just wish I’d done something for people to remember me by.”

Daniel reaches out and places a light, cautious hand between Phil’s shoulders. All the breath Phil had been holding in (unnecessary, but automatic) rushes out; he bends up to the very real touch. He lets out another sob at the sheer sensation of it. The hand is neither cold nor warm, but it’s palpable, more than Phil had ever hoped to feel again.

“Hey,” Daniel interrupts after a few minutes, as Phil’s crying dies down, “you can call me Dan, by the way.”

Phil smiles, and laughs a little. “Sure.”

Dan pulls his hand away from Phil’s back and tucks it neatly in his lap beside his other hand. “So, look, I’m glad I found you. But there are other people I’ve got to look for, too.”

Phil feels his heart drop, and he’s sure his face must fall with it. “Oh. Yeah, I understand.”

“This doesn’t mean you have to come right now, though,” Dan hurries to add. “Or that I’m just going to leave you here. But now, you know you have options, and you know there’s something more than this.”

“That really does help,” Phil is quick to assure.

“My suggestion is to find a place where I can find you next time, okay? Don’t be so hard to get a hold of.”

“I used to never answer my phone,” Phil smiles.

“You’re a slippery guy through-and-through,” Dan agrees. “But for goodness sakes, you’re a ghost now. Act like it. Haunt something.” He sounds serious, but his smile gives him away. He stands up. Phil looks up at him. “Take care of yourself,” he seems to add as an afterthought. Then, he’s gone, dissipated in the soft pre-evening light.

Phil feels bright inside. He spends the night on that bench, sprawled out and looking at the stars.

—

Phil haunts the bench. Which is strange, frankly, because of all things he never thought he’d be spending his afterlife haunting a bench. Maybe a kitchy, decrepit old house, or a bathroom stall, or even a video game store, but not a random bench in a park overlooking a bed of roses. Nothing else stands out as having any real meaning to him, though, so this is just as good a place as any, really. He makes a point of being there for at least three hours every day, which seems like a perfectly good amount of time to set aside for a haunting. Maybe if he were doing this proper he’d spend all day there, moaning and lounging and sending little waves of shivers-up-your-spine emotion through passsers-by. But he just doesn’t have the heart for it.

It’s only a week until Dan shows up again, and he raises an eyebrow at Phil immediately upon arriving. Phil, who has his legs thrown over the bench’s armrests, quickly attempts to straighten up and trips over himself in the process.

“Really, a park bench?”

“Yep!”

“Well, I can’t complain so long as you’re consistent,” Dan shrugs. Phil smiles dumbly up at Dan and Dan shifts his weight from foot to foot. “Okay, what?”

“It’s just so nice to have someone to talk to who talks back,” Phil answers honestly.

Dan smiles a little sadly. “I get that a lot.” He moves and sits next to Phil on the bench. “You know, when you move on, you won’t have to be surrounded by the living. There will be other spirits; you can interact with them all, maybe even some you know.”

“Yeah, but, I’d miss it here. I’d miss all the people, going out and doing things and li —“ Phil swallows. “Living their lives.”

“You can’t live through them,” Dan reminds him.

“But maybe I can see what I was supposed to be doing,” Phil replies, words molding around new thoughts. “I don’t think I did it right, my life. I think I missed something. I don’t know if I was already supposed to have done it or if I was still waiting for it to happen, but. I think there was something there.”

Dan nods thoughtfully. “So you want to stay here longer.”

“Not permanently, I don’t think?” Phil says. “Just long enough to try to make sense of it all. Of my life, what it was supposed to be.”

Dan opens his mouth, then closes it again. He nods, hums, “Hmm.”

Phil turns to him and asks, “Do you want to see a movie together?”

—

They make a habit of it, meeting every week. Dan will ask if Phil is ready to go yet, Phil will say no, and they’ll find something to do for the sake of keeping company. It’s a beacon, keeping Phil centered and sane as he endeavors to stay in this unresponsive world looking for answers.

Phil, for his part, is genuinely trying to find what his potential purpose may have been. He goes out of his way looking for different sorts of creative people, loitering around to see what they do, what they create, what they leave behind. He tries to project himself into their lives, imagines himself doing what they do, but it doesn’t sit right. Something is wrong. Something is missing.

In the end, it makes him feel even more anxious and unaccomplished. All these incredible people, so dedicated and talented, forging names and legacies for themselves as he, forgotten, looks on with longing. He wishes he’d lived more. He wishes he had been more daring and more enthusiastic and more open to living without so many self-imposed limits.

He wonders what he would have done, if he knew he’d die so young. Probably more of everything. Without the promise of years of life to live, what was left? In that span of time, could he have done anything worthwhile? Sure. Other people had done it, so why not him? Because he was Phil? He thinks he may have been capable of something good, even if it wasn’t great, just something to hold his place in the world after he’d gone. He didn’t have to change the world; he wasn’t looking to do anything so ambitious or large-scale as that. But even something small, even changing one life, making the world better by even so minuscule an increment, may have been enough. A testament to his ability, to his life.

All he has now is a gravestone with his name on it and some unmarked boxes in his mum’s attic.

“Do you remember your life?” Phil asks Dan one day. They’re leaning over a dock by the pond; Dan’s been glaring daggers at the geese since they arrived, even though Phil had slapped his arm and told him to cut it out.

Dan grunts and nods an affirmative. Phil, obsessed with physical communication, bumps his shoulder against Dan’s in encouragement, “C’mon, what was it like?”

“It was fine. Short.”

Phil doesn’t want to push his luck, but he does want answers. “What was your childhood like?”

Dan actually smiles a little at this, and he looks at the water when he answers, “Really good. I was a really happy kid. I loved Winnie the Pooh. I did some acting. My parents were really sweet. They still are.”

“I miss my parents, too,” Phil says quietly. “i’m glad they still have my brother, at least.”

“Yeah,” Dan says. “Me too. Still. They did everything right with me. I think they deserved more than what they got.”

Phil doesn’t ask what happened. He doesn’t really want to know. They spend the rest of the afternoon talking about childhood adventures and high school horrors and other things that used to be important, and are important again.

—

“I think I always wanted to live here,” Phil says, face pressed up to the glass of the London Eye’s carriage.

“Why?”

Phil shrugs, grinning over his shoulder at Dan, who has been spending more time looking fondly at Phil than he has the expansive London cityscape. “Just feels right to me.”

“Must feel right to a lot of people, then.”

“Sometimes people are just drawn together.”

Dan looks at Phil meaningfully. “I bet.”

—

Phil starts thinking about those boxes up in the attic; his hard drive is in a box and his life’s little contributions are on that hard drive. Not much, just unedited clips and unfinished videos, but it nags at him that they could have been more, that he should have put more time into them. He never took the tim to be really, truly creative beyond what he did with his crappy cheap camera in short-lived spurts of sudden inspiration. He wonders if, maybe, he should have dedicated more time to being thoughtful about what he did with those clips, dedicated more time to the idea of them. Even if it never led to anything more than a handful of somewhat polished videos, Phil thinks that would be better than the nothing left of him now.

—

“I know it’s been a while since we’ve been doing this, but I really think this might be what I’ve been looking for, honestly it feels like something I’ve been overlooking and I wonder if it’s it, you know, Dan?”

“Phil,” Dan says, face drawn and serious, “I think this is getting out of hand.”

“How can it be out of hand? I can’t even hold anything in my hand, haha! And anyways I think this is really important. I think I know what I was supposed to do. I really do think I’m on to something, like it’s been staring me in the face and I was just too stupid to realize, but I get it now! My regret, the one thing I never did enough of, or well enough at, and now I can —“

“Can what, Phil?” Dan cuts him off, voice grave but otherwise unreadable.

“I. I’m not sure. But something! There has to be something. This can’t just be it.”

“And what if it is, Phil? This is death, it’s just about as definite as it gets. End of the line.”

“But it’s not, can’t be, because why else would I still be here?”

“Just because one reaper is lenient with the rules doesn’t mean it’s your destiny to be left behind while everyone else moves on just fine, Phil.”

“There’s something keeping me here!”

“You’re keeping you here, Phil; just you, not some higher power.”

“There has to be some purpose to my life —“

“And what if there wasn’t?” Dan says, suddenly, abysmally, bordering on cruel. “What if your life meant nothing, and you’ve wasted all this time trying to find a meaning for it because you just can’t stand the fact that not everyone’s lives are meant to mean something?”

Phil, tears in his eyes, fingers digging into his palms, says, “I can’t. Can’t think that way.”

“Why? Why does your life have to mean something?”

“It can’t just mean nothing —“

“It can, though! Mine did! My life amounted to nothing, Phil. Unremarkable. Forgettable.”

“Dan, that can’t be —“

“It is true, okay?” Dan insists.

“No —“

“Look, Phil,” Dan says, dragging a hand through his hair, tugging at it a little. “I’m not going to force you one way or another, but you can stay an eternity here trying to make sense of things that just don’t make sense and end up just feeling sad and disappointed. And it’s not worth it.”

Before Phil can even come up with a response, Dan disappears. Phil fights back the tears and keeps looking.

—

Phil resists the urge to go to his family home. Instead, he goes to his old apartment, where a young happy couple is watching the realization of their bright future unfold before their very eyes. Their cats seems to recognize Phil on the spot; its head perks up and it begins to purr almost immediately as Phil rests a hand just above its ears. The young man sits at a computer, the young woman sits on the couch. He’s on some sort of editing program while she fiddles with a camera.

“Jumpcuts preferred?” the man asks.

“Mm,” the woman affirms, meticulously swiping a lens with a small gray cloth.

The man nods and clicks the mouse a few times. It’s quiet, easy, and sweet. A shared space that feels at once like a cottage and an art studio, with big light umbrellas and a tripod situated in the corner and a box full of props kicked messily to the side. Phil feels almost at home here again.

That is, until the baby starts crying. Little, hiccupy sobs start up in one of the bedrooms. The man makes to get up, but the woman rises immediately and waves for him to sit down, she’s got this. He smiles appreciatively at her (affectionately, warmly), “Thanks, Louise, sweetheart.” She smiles and ducks into the room. The cries die down. The sunlight filters in uninhibited.

Phil could cry for want of it all.

—

The next time they meet at the bench, Dan comes prepared with an apologetic expression already on his face and an, “I’m sorry” already on his lips. So does Phil. They both end up apologizing at the same time, then laughing, quietly.

“I should have explained better,” Dan says. "Nothing came out right, and it was all cruel."

“I shouldn’t have been so difficult,” Phil says back.

“What I — What I meant was, even if your life wasn’t very meaningful, it doesn’t mean you weren’t important. You were important to someone, at least one person, in your life.”

“I know.”

“And. And there’s always the possibility you could be important — very important, really — in death. Not just the act itself, I mean the after. Uhm. The after-part.”

“Right.”

“I became a reaper because I didn’t want to leave yet,” Dan begins, words spilling out rapidly as if he can’t hold them back. “I felt like I didn’t do enough. I wanted to stay on Earth until I did something worth being proud of. But I’m not on Earth for myself anymore, not really; and it’s better that way.”

“Mmhm.”

“It’s not just you who felt like they were missing something and. And meeting you, I think I finally understand what I felt like I was missing,” Dan finishes, a bit breathless. He’s staring down at Phil, who’s less than a breath away, and Phil feels that limited distance between them crack with an energy not yet acted upon. Dan leans down and presses his forehead against Phil’s; Phil slips his hand into Dan’s, who covers it with his other hand. "Your death has been very meaningful. To me. You're very important to me," Dan chuckles weakly, and if his hands weren't wrapped around Phil's, Phil is sure he would be running them through his hair in that nervous self-deprecating way he does. The pressure of Dan’s skin is ethereal, neither here nor there yet somehow entirely perceptible. It defies definition. It’s almost as if his skin melts in where it meets Dan’s: two subsets of the same being.

Phil presses up and seals it with a kiss. It’s a gentle, reassuring push-against of lips and quiet baring of souls. Phil might even swear he can feel a heartbeat pulsing in his fingers as he brings the hand not trapped between Dan’s up to trace the delicate part of his neck just below the corner of his jaw. Dan places a few giddy pecks over Phil’s lips and cheeks and eyelids, and Phil giggles and the levity of it all. He feels like there’s a buoy in the very center of him, pulling him up up up -- into Dan, into a new sort of light beyond anything he’s felt before.

—

“Busy week?” Dan asks, leaning over to press his nose to the side of Phil’s head, just behind his ear.

“You could say that,” Phil replies, leaning subconsciously into the touch.

“I’ve got a car accident to track down.”

“One old lady who was fighting to the very end and one kid who got it too early.”

Dan winces, presses a quick consoling kiss on top of Phil’s hair. “It’s tough work, I know.”

Phil smiles, turning to look at Dan, blue eyes lit up in a moment’s excitement. “Guess you could say it’s ghouling work? Haha, get it, Dan, because it’s like grueling, as in —“

He doesn’t get to finish, because Dan clamps a hand firmly over his mouth, saying, “I have had enough! I shouldn’t have to live through this!”

Phil drags Dan’s hand off of his mouth just long enough to point out, “Really, you’re not living through anything at all —“ before Dan shoves his lips up against Phil’s in a much more effective silencing treatment. Phil, reduced to little chuckles and big smiles against Dan’s mouth, gives in easily, melting up and in to the familiarity that only comes with being so close to a soul so intimately intertwined to his own.


End file.
